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Trump announces Ken Paxton as possible AG pick: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/20/donald-trump-ken-paxton-attorney-general/
This is interesting because 1) Paxton is an aggressive partisan willing to engage in skullduggery, exactly the sort of person project 2025 would want and 2) he’s one of the few people trump has shown loyalty to. Also unlike Greg Abbott, who turned down the VP job, he seems to want the job. Also, last time he was out of office Abbott appointed his own chief of staff as attorney general, so it’s not like that would strip mine the Texas state government of conservative talent.
It’s worth noting that a lot of trump’s policy success from the last admin came through bill Barr, and an aggressive consiglieri in the AG seat is probably what trump needs to be effective.
Which makes Barr's recent statements against Trump all the more entertaining. Here's a man that pushed a lot of Trump's policies through an extremely unfriendly DOJ, turning around and saying Trump is unfit for office.
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The thought of Paxton prosecuting the Tides Foundation the same way this administration prosecuted the NRA is wonderful, but will he be able to get the staff and bureaucratic whips together to do it?
Project 2025 has approximately zero chance of succeeding:
The president is already allowed to appoint approximately 4,000 people to high-level agency positions. At any given time in the Trump Administration, approximately 1200, or about a third, were unfilled. If he can't manage to fill these it's unlikely he's going to fill anywhere from 5 to 50 thousand additional posts.
He's already notoriously bad at picking aides who are loyal to him. He fought with his own cabinet more than any president in recent memory. There's no reason to believe that four years of not having to appoint anyone is somehow going to make him better at this role. This problem is magnified by the fact that most of these positions aren't going to be under his direct supervision, and he'll only know that they don't have the requisite loyalty when a scandal erupts. Not a good look.
If you remove a career bureaucrat and replace him with a political hack, the new guy isn't likely to have an in-depth understanding on how things actually work. Bureaucrat A doesn't do what you want so you replace him with Bureaucrat B. Bureaucrat B is dedicated to doing what you ask, except he isn't well-versed in the Administrative Procedure Act or the various other laws governing the office, and he's essentially starting from scratch. Except there's no time to get up to speed because the president wants this done now, so he ends up doing something that violates the law and the action ends up getting tied up in court for the next six months while the new guy in charge bungles various other duties of the office that were an afterthought under the first guy. Now the president's in the position where he has to fire Bureaucrat B and replace him with another guy who didn't make the cut the last time and is now even more likely to screw things up. Meanwhile guys appointed to non-contentious positions are making their own little messes that just become fodder for your opponents without any political gain. This obviously isn't going to happen every time, but when you're talking about thousands of positions the Venn diagram isn't always going to match up and there's a good chance you find you've appointed a moron.
That depends on what you mean by 'succeeding.' Trump went into his first term with no plan for how to staff his administration. As I see it, the main goal of Project 2025 is just to work on that stuff in advance so that if Trump wins another term he won't have to start from scratch the day after the election. Will it revolutionize the US government forever? No. But at least this time he'll have a list of names he can draw from to fill government positions with loyalists.
And they don't really have to be competent. It would be an improvement over the first term if the bureaucracy was just not actively working against Trump's administration.
You're assuming that Trump is actually behind the compilation of these lists. From what I've read, it's all conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation that have proven in the past they don't give a shit so much about loyalty to Trump as they do advancing their own agendas. Using these outside lists when he didn't have a clue himself is a big part of what got him in the position he was in during his first term. Asking them to come up with more names isn't going to change that. And competence does matter. At a certain point you're getting less into people whose job consists of making policy decisions and more into the realm of everyday managerial functioning. For instance, say that Trump thinks the ATF's FFL application review process is too strict and wants to make it more liberal, and he fires the guy responsible for this process with a gun nut who's dedicated to making sure practically anyone who applies gets an FFL with minimum hassle. That may be great in theory, but if the guy in question has no clue about how the review process works and ends up bumbling through his job to the point where delay times are so long that applications that would have been a breeze under the old guy are suffering inordinate delays, the exact constituency he's trying to appease isn't going to be very happy. I can just see the article in The Atlantic now: "He thought Trump would make it easier for him to run his gun store; instead it's become a nightmare."
I feel like it would be an improvement over the first term if he manages to fully staff his administration with people who are willing to at least pretend to be on his side.
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Prosecuting the Tides foundation isn't going to do much. As a "dark money" organization most people haven't heard of them the way they've heard of the NRA, so the chance that anyone will actually care is low. Furthermore, as a foundation, they don't actually do anything themselves but simply distribute money to other groups. It takes a long time for an advocacy organization like the NRA to build up the donor network and social capital to have the kind of influence they've had. If you're just distributing money, there's plenty of other advocacy organizations that can easily take up that slack.
The biggest problem, though, is that most of the alleged malfeasance on the part of Tides is directed towards liberal advocacy groups who claim they mismanaged money intended for their benefit. For example, they're currently being sued in California by BLM, who claims the group misdirected 33 million in funds that were raised as part of a joint campaign and were supposed to be earmarked. Any other prosecutions are going to be in a similar vein. It's hardly an own of the libs if most libs haven't heard of the group you're prosecuting and the ones who have are likely to be your star witnesses. If BLM ends up siding with the administration it's hardly a good look.
I'd caution that the NRA and its members are technically the 'victim' in the current New York lawsuit, but that didn't stop James from threatening the entire organization's mandate, digging through and almost-certainly leaking a ton of internal records, and pretty much crippling both the legal and political expenditures for one election already and probably a second. Tots coincidentally, no insurance provider in the state is willing to work with the organization, a ton of competent personnel have fled the ship or started planning competitors with all the inefficiencies and lost time that demands, so on. We won't know the full reckoning for a bit (June?), but the possibility that the org ends up under a hostile state's conservatorship is absolutely still in the cards.
Tides doesn't face that threat, but it's not because the state can't fuck over a badly operated donor funnel; it's because Republicans don't have the infrastructure to make that push.
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It doesn't matter what you get them for as long as you confiscate their money and give it to regime-supporting organizations through settlement agreements, like Obama did. The famous "120 mil to the govt or 40 mil to La Raza" option.
You seem to buy the leftist propaganda that "owning the libs" is about bullying rather than destroying the enemy's ability to wage war.
Fine them 60 billion for not having enough signage on their disabled parking spaces, whatever you can pin on them. Tesla had to pay a hundred mil because a black guy said "nigga" without being fired, bet we can find plenty of hostile workplace materiel in "literally slaughter colonizers and their children btw my coworkers are specifically the colonizers I'm talking about" if we really try.
Of course the real golden ticket is finding that the tides foundation is conspiring to fund criminal activity and launder money from that activity.
Which starts by getting sentences on street level antifa groups and working up until you can get all their lawyers disbarred.
Even setting this as a goal counts as a win when Conservatism spent years trying to "win debates" in a bow tie.
I have not heard of this, and my googling isn't coming up with anything. Can you provide more specifics?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-prohibits-settlement-agreements-that-donate-money-to-outside-groups/2017/06/06/c0b2e700-4b02-11e7-bc1b-fddbd8359dee_story.html
http://www.wsj.com/articles/look-whos-getting-that-bank-settlement-cash-1472421204
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-justice-departments-bank-settlement-slush-fund/2016/08/31/a3b4da7a-6eec-11e6-8365-b19e428a975e_story.html?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.747f8283a443
https://rtp.fedsoc.org/paper/improper-third-party-payments-in-u-s-government-litigation-settlements/
https://www.judicialwatch.org/doj-give-leftist-groups-cut-b-settlement/
Obama is a Chicago politician, and US politics is now running on the Chicago model, shaking down entire sectors of the economy to fund their machine politics. Trump ended the policy rather than using it to fund the right, and now Biden has restarted it to keep leftists swimming in cash. As if they didn't get enough of it from the billions handed to them in the "inflation reduction act"
It is hard to overstate the value of actual evidence in these discussions. thank you for making a habit of providing it.
I'll get banned anyway so it doesn't help
Possibly, but probably not for posts like this one. "I am angry" is not generally the type of post this place is built to facilitate. "Here is why I am angry" is much better. "Here is the situation, and here is why it is producing anger" is better still. Actual evidence provides much better grounds for discussion than raw assertion.
I greatly appreciated your previous post linking to Derrick Bell as well, in addition to the writeup on the Ctrl-Pew prosecution.
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Ken Paxton has a core staff of highly competent people that are loyal to him personally- they left the AG office to defend him during his impeachment- and the opportunity to recruit almost unlimitedly from red state governments, even ignoring project 2025 lists of potential conservative hires.
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God.
Paxton represents everything I dislike about this state. Setting aside his little scandal, he’s a shameless partisan who grandstands whenever he gets the chance. Every AG statement just drips with condescension and/or righteous anger at the opposition. I suppose, given our political climate, that makes him a savvy political operator.
While we have various stupid and offensive laws, I can’t really blame him for enforcing them. But I do not look forward to seeing how he operates with a more deadlocked legislature. Especially if Trump is looking for opportunities to get even.
Furgeson? Bonta? Becerra? Who were we talking about again?
It's true, the competition in that space is stiff.
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Paxton's condescension at the opposition probably isn't great for the longer-term stability of the nation, but in terms of direct impact, I'm more worried about everybody else. If the future were dominated by the most authoritarian political movements in the country stomping each other's faces, well, it'd be bad, but I can't say it would be bad because of the poor innocent jerks.
It's the people in the crossfire. There's always some fuzzy edges where maybe the immigration enforcement is rough-handed to discourage illegal immigrants, or maybe the LGBT restrictions are breaking privacy For The Children, or what have you, but there's also times where people are pretty obviously hammering a matter to drum up attention, or even just because they'd be expensive in human and financial and political capital to defend, and Paxton hasn't hesitated.
Paxton's far from unique in this, and I'm not sure he's even in the top ten. If politics were the proverbial game of chicken, we've long since gone from simply throwing the steering wheel out the window, to shooting a hired driver and cutting the brake lines. But Garland's been bad enough, and we don't need two in a row.
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Tangentially related...
How much should Trump get even, if he is elected? Either choice he makes seems pretty fraught.
Option 1) Play the bigger man. Pardon himself, obviously, and a few limited other people. Beyond that do nothing. This will prevent a wider conflagration in the culture war. Downside: without a tit-for-tat, the left will be emboldened for much greater tats in the future.
Option 2) Do unto him as he hath done unto me. Pursue corruption investigations against his pursuers (many of whom quite deserve them). Go after voter fraud and ballot harvesting. Turn the executive branch against the left in the same ways it has been turned against the right thus far. Upside: When both sides are armed, the chance for peace is higher than when only one side is armed. Downside: The system will probably resist him, and it could provoke a bigger backlash.
If I were Trump, I'd go with option 1. In reality, I expect him to just do whatever he wakes up feeling like he should do that day with little follow through.
Speaking for myself, with a caveat: Option two, massive. Not quite Treblinka, but I want skulls, family fortunes confiscated/destroyed, any resistance killed or imprisoned along with anyone they care about. Imagine Putin, but a lot more oligarchs falling out of windows.
The caveat is that this has to be done competently, and I don't think Trump or his hires have it in them.
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Playing cooperate against defectbot is how the Republicans have been losing for decades.
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I literally cannot conceive of Trump going for option one. If he did, it'd completely rock my worldview and my trust of all of the political voices around me. Is there any time you can point to where he's behaved with such magnanimity?
Despite the "lock her up" rhetoric, Trump didn't actually try to lock Hilary up. That's just off the top of my head. In fact, I don't remember any anti-Democrat lawfare from his administration, although I'm sure we can dig something up.
Why does your worldview rely so strongly on Trump being vindictive?
He's awful in many ways, but vindictiveness doesn't seem to be one of them. His nature is impulsive, not cold-blooded.
That's not magnanimity. At best it's baseline, expected behaviour. If you find that to be impressive coming from Trump, that seems like a meaner thing to say about him than even most of his leftie foes tend to use, at least the ones that are at all grounded in reality. (And I say that as one of those foes, though increasingly I'm only "leftie" by the standards of this place.)
Sorry, but this is annoying.
I said Trump is not vindictive. Then someone replied with "give an example of magnanimity". Of course, magnanimity is not the same as not vindictive. Ignoring this contradiction, I replied with an example of how he is not vindictive.
Now you are trying to force me to defend a claim I never made, that Trump is magnanimous? I never said that.
Are you saying you didn't write this?
Also, the piece I replied to was your direct response to the question, referring directly to what I've quoted above, "Is there any time you can point to where he's behaved with such magnanimity?". Like, it's literally what you gave as an example of that, or so anyone would think from reading that part of the thread. I think the "misunderstanding", if it is that and not just revisionist history, is pretty damn understandable.
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It mostly didn't work, but settling with Defense Distributed (and giving a not-trivial amount of cash in the settlement offer) is the sort of lawfare I'd expect from a coldblooded conservative, if small-scale by the standards of that sort of cy pres-like lawfare. And then there's the obvious guesswho stuff that didn't work entirely.
I agree that a Count of Monte Cristo-style planned revenge isn't really Trump's strong point, though.
EDIT: that said, I do think it's the sort of thing Paxton would a) have the temperament and skills for, and b) absolutely do it for both political ends and to make an impulsive boss happy.
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He didn’t even try to Lock Her Up, for one.
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To be clear, this is not a corrupt policy choice and shouldn't be lumped in as some malicious attack motivated by revenge-getting. It is just actually bad that elections are insecure and political operatives collect ballots.
The problem there is that going after voter fraud in a non-grandstanding way means he actually needs to name names and have evidence. You can't just say there was MASSIVE FRAUD in Detroit or wherever; you have to actually say here is a corrupt election official and here's exactly what he did and here's the evidence to prove it. Most of the voter fraud stuff in 2020 was more along the lines of "I don't like the looks of this", which doesn't exactly help you out too much when it comes to a prosecution.
I've written on this at some length in the past, but the evidence is much stronger than "I don't like the looks of this". I'll accept that the elections are free and fair when there aren't thousands of people mentally adjudicated incompetent voting in my state. If the clerk's office admits it's not capable of running a cross-check that prevents that subset, specifically covered as ineligible to vote, I have no idea why anyone would believe it's capable of preventing the myriad of other ineligible voting that occurs.
I hate to do this but you did the math wrong in the earlier post. You said:
The article says that there are about 22,000 voters on the incompetent list in Wisconsin. A random sample of 1,000 taken showed that 95 people had cast ballots at some point since 2008. Without numbers specific to 2020 there's no way to estimate how many improper votes were cast. That being said, if they want to implement a system to catch this I'm all for it. If they want to prosecute the people who voted illegally, I'm all for it, though going after incompetent people probably isn't a good look.
The same is true for the indefinitely confined. If you want to go after these people that's fine, but you'd better be prepared to investigate all 250,000+ instances and prosecute each one that doesn't meet whatever strict reading you want to give the law. You can't just go into Milwaukee and find a few black people or bleeding heart liberal activists who violated the law and use them as an example of "Democrat voter fraud"; you have to be willing to go into rural areas and ask MAGA hat guys detailed questions about whether Grandma is really indefinitely confined when she still has an active driver's license and was seen at the grocery store walking around the day before submitting her application. That isn't going to sit well with anybody, which is why nobody is ever going to suggest such a thing.
The context of the "indefinitely confined" issue is a disagreement about whether people who were staying home because of COVID-19 were eligible to vote by post on medical grounds. Eventually the Wisconsin Supreme Court said that they were not, but not in time to purge the voter rolls. So this isn't a case of fraudulent voting - it is a case of irregular voting due to blue-county election officials making an incorrect interpretation of State law in an unusual situation which the Supreme Court didn't correct in time, and voters acting on advice from their counties. Prosecuting individual voters over this would be an abuse of process. Part of the Project 2025 playbook is that an incoming Trump II administration should launch federal prosecutions of the county officials, which would be (and is intended to be) catastrophic for the resilience of the American electoral process, but would not be legally outrageous.
I don't know enough about Wisconsin law to know how likely it was that these votes could have been tossed if the Trump campaign had raised the issue in post-election litigation, but "large numbers of facially valid Dem postal votes should be tossed on technicalities" was an argument the Trump campaign mostly chose not to run with - both in its litigation strategy and in its public messaging.
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I actually very much appreciate it. I've referenced this a few times and haven't had anyone point out the error, which was going to result in me continuing to reference it. That this goes back to 2008 rather than being a single year count probably makes the per election frequency roughly an order of magnitude lower. So, duly noted, and thanks for that.
With regard to the second paragraph - yeah, I know, and I've tried to be pretty consistent about stating that none of these numeric estimates are intended to prove that 2020 was "stolen" since they don't even provide evidence on the direction of fraud and error. The point here isn't that each instance is a vote that should have gone the other way or that I think all of these people are criminals (in fact, I'd bet almost none of them intended to do anything illegal), but that the system is so shoddy that it allows a whole bunch of illegal voting that everyone shrugs at. I don't think we need to go track down a bunch of illegal votes from 2012 or something, we can just implement a system going forward that makes a reasonable attempt to have clean databases and require identification. Personally, I would prefer elimination of absentee balloting, but I know this isn't politically tenable. My offer to opponents would be replacing it with excellent early in-person balloting and making election day itself a holiday; I still know that's not getting done, but I do believe that it's a good-faith position to hold for someone that cares about security but isn't actually trying to engage in nefarious voter suppression.
Finally, while these numbers don't give any definitive data on fraud, I strongly believe they bring the lie to the ridiculous claims that there is basically no illegal voting. When we literally can't stop mentally incompetent people that are explicitly ineligible to vote from doing so, it seems pretty obvious that there are going to be at least a few other categories of illegal voting. The core of my position is that we should make a good effort to stop illegal voting and that we're obviously not doing that right now.
"a whole bunch of illegal voting" I would think that having an order of magnitude error in your thinking pointed out to you would maybe reign in unsubstantiated claims of large amounts of fraudulent votes. There simply is not wide spread voter fraud going on in the United States, when it does happen, even in stupid instances of a college kid voting at school and at home, it is eventually found and prosecuted for the most part.
https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
Lol at the downvotes...amazing stuff. Don't worry, you're about to chase me off. Then you can have your echo chamber.
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At my job it's enough to point to the potential for things to go wrong to be able to guard against them.
There is a motte and bailey between real past and possible future vote fraud. A common reading of "Go after voter fraud" would be that such fraud actually is happening in sufficient quantity to merit pursuit.
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There were lots of specific allegations in 2020, and most of the cases weren't heard for lack of standing. To the extent that there have been follow-up investigations, much of the relevant evidence no longer exists. Chain-of-custody is gone.
I guess I'm trying to say, without opening up the whole 2020 debate all over again, that everyone in the world agreed that 2020 was stolen, it would be extremely difficult to name specific actors. We could prove that 3k ballots from Fulton County were fraudulent, but who created them? Unless somebody came forward there would have to be an investigation first.
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Why? What successes have come from previous iterations of this option? Why do you believe it would deliver superior results versus prosecuting the culture war to the greatest extent possible?
When you are weak it is best to avoid antagonizing your enemy.
The worst case scenario is that the bureacracy would just say "no" to Trump's orders, precipitating a constitutional crisis. More likely they'll just slow play his demands until the clock is run out. Then the lawfare against him can begin anew.
The only way he doesn't die in jail is if a Republican is elected in 2028. For that reason, he needs to remain popular with the people which means not triggering a crisis.
A constitutional crisis ends with a red state governor playing Sulla. There are no men with guns willing to actually fight for progressive values and Our Democracy(tm).
As the response to Trump's suggestion of using the military to stop BLM riots, there are; we call them the US military. The officers are blue now, the rank-and-file are not all that red, and many are minorities A red state governor trying anything likely ends up being crushed.
Federal forces obeyed their orders to suppress BLM riots, there just weren’t very many such orders.
As I recall, Trump had to use Customs and Border Patrol to do it.
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Yesterday it was true that there were no man with guns willing to fight for progressive values.
Tomorrow it is possible. The AI guys and people like Sergei Brin perhaps. And of course I am referring to drone tech.
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Granting for the sake of discussion that Reds are "weak", it seems to me that all Red Tribe victories in living memory have come from actions generally characterized as antagonistic, and no valuable victories have ever been delivered through actions generally characterized as cooperative or conciliatory. Further, given the state of the culture war, it's hard to imagine how this could possibly be otherwise. Many, many Blue Tribe actions, especially in the last decade, seem to me to be strongly antagonistic to the point where a response is fundamentally necessary to retain even a modicum of legitimacy for the existing system.
What's driving your definition of "worst case", here? Worst case relative to what?
I believe the current system has been engineered by Blues to be incapable of providing redress for Red grievances. It doesn't matter what elections we win, what laws we pass, what norms we follow, what processes we engage with, the output is always failure for our goals and values and victory for those of Blues. If that is the situation, then how would precipitating a constitutional crisis make things "worse"? We've already seen the normalization of organized political violence nationwide, universal violations of fundamental human rights, the partisan weaponization of the security services, and the complete collapse of rule of law. What would a constitutional crisis add to those problems?
I am perfectly willing to see Trump die in jail. Trump is by no means irreplicable, and his value as a martyr could easily exceed his value as a President. It seems obviously worse to me to see the numerous catastrophic abuses committed by Blue Tribe be cemented into durable norms, as was done with their abuses in previous generations. Playing nice for fear of the consequences of conflict is exactly how we arrived in our current predicament. It is past time to fight fire with fire.
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I'm for "Trump smash". Breaking the current environment that any tactic is OK for the left but none (including ordinary political rallies, which as you may recall the left liked to disrupt in 2016) for the right is necessary for the right.
But I suspect that a Trump in Sing Sing for putting an expense in the wrong ledger category(with the correct one determined retroactively, natch) will have trouble doing any of those. The boomercons will desert him as a criminal and he'll lose, and the left will be emboldened.
Of course if they put Trump in Sing Sing and he wins, he'll almost certainly at least TRY "Trump smash".
The respectable class of Boomercons have already migrated to the left.
Trump's bombastic style actually appeals quite a bit to young blacks and Hispanics, and the Democrats are having a hard time keeping them onsides. Biden is being forced to defend the black vote, and it's going badly.
Witness Biden's commencement speech at Morehouse yesterday in which students turned their back on him.
What style is going to appeal to young voters? This or... this? Whatever the issues, one of these people has rizz. And the other doesn't.
I have Trump at 60% odds right now, but much higher if he is jailed. Personally, I plan to vote RFK this time around, but would probably go for Trump as a protest vote if he his jailed, despite his obvious awfulness.
Yeah but that's Israel rather than any style issue. He can't go full Hamas without losing a rather important segment of Democratic elites (and anyway I'm pretty sure it's not personally his desire to do so), but that hurts him with blacks.
It’s the Economy, Stupid.
Many negros are antisemitic, but not in the sense of giving two shits about Israel or Palestinians. On the other hand, like most working class voters they’re very exposed to price increases and inflation is one of the few things that can lead to substantial black defections from the DNC machine.
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NR is pretty boomercon. They hate Trump but support him in the trials.
Most boomercons were never as anti-Trump as is now sometimes claimed. They didn’t like it, but many still voted for him.
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Look on the bright side- good chance he’ll get out of our hair and be replaced with Greg Abbott’s(who will at least give technocrats a hearing) chief of staff.
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